It is well known that crowd control is necessary in many common venues, such as sports events, rock concerts, hotels, universities, and others It would also be desirable to handle crowd control in ways that are amenable to integrating ancillary services and products that are user friendly, and beneficial to both the system operator and to the user.
The backbone of this inventive system is the integration of a multiplicity of modern methods and apparatus around an accelerated people behavior control concept which could typically allow a concurrently available single smart card chip, off-line, to authenticate a vital up-to-date estimation of a single member of group of over two million members, or for a stadium control box to know even more relevant information about one or more individual from a plurality of membership groups, e.g., all of the fans of all of the leagues in the United Kingdom. Using this proprietary tested method, sports arenas and concert halls, universities and hotels can offer services and product in a more amenable fashion, at lower cost, with any such level of security which would be commensurate to the state of art, the resources available to the users, owners and unfortunately, the vast capabilities and resources of adversaries.
Hotel operators typically control hotel guests' access to hotel rooms with mechanical locks and metal keys, and mechanically differentiated, magnetically coded, or chip-card tokens. Stadium operators serve dynamically active crowds, consisting of enthusiastic fans of local and often adversarial teams; several classes of season subscribers; corporate and other fans with various entitlements; “aways” (mostly fans from the opposing team); buy-back “ticket” purchasers (from season subscribers who get remuneration for matches they cannot attend where the seat may be sold to an entitled fan or a chance purchasers); and of vital importance, stadium and sport club employees. As opposed to relatively acquiescent hotel guests or university students, sports fans are often an unruly crowd, with adversarial interests, demanding intense service in a short time interval.
Hotel keepers typically abandoning conventional door locks with keys, as they suffer from expensive lock maintenance, often demanding key replacement, lock adjustment or lock replacement typically caused by the “forgetful” guest who fails to return his keys upon leaving the hotel. Typically, conventional door locks are being replaced by a variety of coded plastic devices. Popular entitlement devices are magnetic stripe cards, magnetically coded and semiconductor embedded chip keys resembling conventional keys and mechanically coded (typically with strategically placed holes) tokens.
Typically, the electronic lock acceptors are self-contained, off-line operative and battery powered; occasionally the devices are wired; either networked to the guest check-in counter for on-line operation, or wired, only to avoid problems related to batteries and the difficulties of timely replacement.
In all instances, elaborate means are necessary to ensure that at a given time interval, the door lock will recognize the token to be bona fide, and, if possible, with an approved length of stay. In addition, means must be provided to ensure that authorized hotel employees can gain entrance to the hotel room, to provide routine and emergency services, e.g., cleaning or forced entrance to care for a disabled guest. In many installations, such hotel service personnel would have master electronic or mechanical master keys. Synchronizing the system, so that a door will recognize a synchronously encoded key to allow legitimate entrance at a given time, is typically the problem that faces designers of such systems. Typically, a new synchronized key or keys must be presented to the hotel door, when a guest's key is inoperative. Such service, typically, overrides normal security procedures. The principle involved in such conventional mechanical lock and electronically controlled door lock settings is that that the a door must be synchronized with specific parameters in advance to recognize the unique features of the token or key. Electronic keys typically possess time-variant features, and the systems typically employ vulnerable schemes for synchronization, whereas any mechanical time-variance entails manual mechanical adjustment or replacement.
Manually synchronized mechanical locks are described in Sedley, U.S. Pat. No. 4,312,198. Sedley's lock consisted of a non-magnetic key studded with small magnets, operative to repel magnetic studs in the lock mechanism. The placement of the studs in the lock could be changed manually by a tool operative to alter the small magnet “combination”. Saliga, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,397,884 suggests a time variant code system, where the hotel check-in desk would algorithmically insert a series of time linked codes relating to the projected stay of the guest in the hotel. The door lock's microprocessor with a real-time clock, would then ascertain if a link code in the key's memory matches a current access code. U.S. Pat. No. 5,939,694 describes a check-in station for hotels, operative to issue time linked access control devices for VingCard AS, Norway's diverse access control product line of magnetic striped plastic cards, smart cards, and other plastic security devices. U.S. Pat. No. 5,321,395 describes a wireless electronic smart card type access control system, wherein a via a tuned circuit, a wireless contactless is activated to emulate a time variant keycode of entrance.
The methods of this invention are operative to safely prove identity of a valid entity in a system, to supply information to a cryptographically operated reader, with relative small memory size able to allow off-line entry to an applicant for entrance pendant on recent or immediate status of the applicant, as to the point of entry, the expected time interval of entry, and in some instances to revert in due time to an on-line mode as would be necessary in a crowd control environment, or time and attendance entrance points for university or hotel employees.
Older Fortress GB Ltd. systems, some of which were deployed several years ago, handle up to 50,000 dynamically changing system clients, and presently deployed systems are able to accommodate up to 250,000 system clients in a disbursed environment with a plurality of entry points. Fortress GB Ltd's competitors have not been able to control access to such large clientele. The new systems, will easily accommodate up to 1,000,000 potential users of such a system, where each of the 1,000,000 applicants for entry are recognizable in any one of the plurality of off-line points of entry. With new low-cost orders of magnitude large non-volatile memory, future entry controllers will easily accommodate, off-line, hundreds of millions of users' tokens and tens of millions of reader devices, embedded in a plurality of conventional and futuristic devices.
These systems have been and are being deployed with a multiplicity of security levels, methods and devices. Typically, the connections between the readers, servers, issuing computers and door and gate controllers have been protected with Public Key and symmetric Cryptographic means, e.g., RSA, DES, 3DES and Wolfram methods. Multi-application and multi-vendor applications have typically been implemented on public key protected smart cards and SIM chips. Users have had the benefit of multi-application public key protected smart cards and a plurality of emulated public key applications, using contactless Inside and Mifare devices.
In applicant's Provisional U.S. application No. 60/565,393, methods and apparatus for communicating with contactless smart cards are described, wherein the antenna in the terminal device, e.g., mobile phones, USB secured mass memory devices (Intellifiers) depicted in FIGS. 14 and 15 are integrated into the keypad of said terminal devices. In this patent we suggest that the antenna may also be included in the front plastic case or plastic clam shell cover of a terminal, to reduce power consumption, especially important for very near field NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) used in unique substance detection, e.g., the materials manufactured by Micro Tag Temed Ltd., wherein such materials and means of detection are revealed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,986,550. In this document, we refer to the applied proprietary material as magnetic icons, or by the applicant's trademark, Magicon. In the drawings we have depicted a Magicon residing in the same near field with semiconductor elements containing memory elements that may be adversely affected by the strong NMR fields. In such instances it may be necessary to either apply higher concentrations of proprietary detectable magnetically resonating substances, or alternately, to assure that the semiconductor memory element is designed to be sufficiently immune to the electro-magnetic field necessary for validating the existence of the proprietary substance.
The idea of wireless communicating with microchip memories with a variety of devices is described in applicant's Provisional U.S. application No. 60/565,393. In that application the device antenna is on the keypad or the front cover of the terminal device. The idea of communicating with posters via mobile devices also appears in “Kowalski's Big Bet on Contactless”, in Card Technology of May 2004, page 31.
In this invention, we have set out bases for business plans and technological combinations for negotiating product purchases, for mobile phone betting at the arena or purchasing tickets to a rock concert, etc., where the incentive is a poster with an embedded equivalent of a large memory smart card. Typically, embedded in the microchip is a proprietary material, typically one of the unique Micro Tag's proprietary NMR resonating materials, recognizable by the contactless magnetic scanner via the smart card contactless antenna, typically, giving assurance of origin of the token substrate. The mobile phone downloads the event program, a betting card, a mobile phone negotiation application from a poster. During or previous to the event, the user can place bets, learn the results of his wagers and receive last-minute updates of other sporting events where wagers may still be recorded. At a symphony concert, the user will know that his phone will not ring, except at intermission, and he will have, on the mobile screen, a review of the program, the instrumentalists, the sponsors, possibly with advertisements. At an opera, an additional benefit would be an on-line libretto, in the vernacular or the original, sponsored by an advertiser, or paid for by the user.